RF Blockset Overview

Marc Willerton, MathWorks

Design and simulate RF systems with RF Blockset™.

Video Transcript

RF Blockset is a Simulink library and simulation engine for designing RF systems. It includes models of amplifiers, mixers, S-parameter blocks, and other basic blocks. With RF Blockset you can design the architecture of wireless transceivers used in communication and radar systems. You can connect these blocks and simulate the behavior of RF front ends at the system level.

RF Blockset provides two libraries for RF simulation at different levels of abstraction: Equivalent Baseband and Circuit Envelope.

The circuit envelope library provides the solver for high-fidelity, multi-carrier simulation of networks with arbitrary topologies. Circuit envelope models can be used by RF system designers to refine the architectures of the transceivers.

In this example, a low-IF Hartley receiver is described with blocks from the Circuit Envelope library. RF Blockset elements are defined by linear specifications such as noise figure, and industry-standard Touchstone data files, and by nonlinear specifications such as IP2 and IP3, and 1dB compression point.

For circuit envelope simulation, RF Blockset applies a general rational function model to the data files of S-parameters. The S-parameter block enables the user to plot the data and the result of the rational fit.

With circuit envelope simulation you can predict the impact of interferers, spurious signals, image signals, and other non-linearities on your RF receiver.

The Equivalent Baseband library enables fast, discrete-time simulation of single-carrier 2-port cascaded systems. Equivalent baseband models can be used by digital signal processing engineers to estimate the impact of RF phenomena on the overall communication system performance.

In this example, the RF receiver of a radar system is implemented using blocks from the Equivalent Baseband library. You can perform link budget analysis and simulate your system capturing RF impairments such as noise and odd order non-linearity.

With RF Blockset you can develop enhanced digital signal processing algorithms to mitigate and correct imperfections due to RF subsystems. Or you can refine the specifications of RF front ends using a top-down design methodology. RF Blockset can thus improve the collaboration between system architects and RF implementation engineers.

For more information, please visit the RF Blockset product page on MathWorks.com